ACO-IH: An improved ant colony optimization algorithm for Airport Ground Service Scheduling

Many airport ground service scheduling (AGSS) problems can be formulated as vehicle routing problem with tight time windows, short travel time and re-used vehicles (VRPTSR). A model with multiple objectives to minimize the number of vehicles used, the total start time of serving flights and the total flow time of vehicles for VRPTSR is presented. Based on the facts that ant colony optimization (ACO) has good performance in solving combinatorial optimization problems with multi objectives, the ACO algorithm with MAX-MIN and rank-based ant system is proposed; an efficient heuristic called earliest due date first (EDD) is incorporated into ACO as a comparative ant in order to improve the performance of ACO. Numerical computations show that the proposed ACO can construct good solutions in reasonable time. At last, policies for dealing with non-homogeneous vehicles are presented, which makes it more applicable.